>Vietnam coincided for most of its period with a great economic boom;
>the stock market and workers wages arguably collapsed starting with
>our withdrawal around 1973.
You're not thinking like a Wall Streeter, Nathan. Vietnam was an economic disaster because it unleashed inflation. That inflation turned Treasury bonds into "certificates of confiscation," as people used to say. If you take a broad political view of inflation, then the loss in Vietnam meant a blow to bourgeois control - not only was there that loss, there was the pushy Third World, OPEC, people in the streets, etc. It was only with the ascent of Reagan that order was restored.
Doug